Friend of a Friend
by Rebukes
Summary: And then there was this L guy. He's supposed to be this big, intricate part of the story, yeah?  Well, he's not. Not my story, at least. Ask Mello to tell you his, one day.


Imagine: you're eight years old, your parents left you while they went off on a gambling cruise, and usually, when they'd leave you alone, you were fine. You're still fine. Only this time, they're not.

You had a name back then. A _real_ name, and it was the only thing you ever answered to. Because really, why would it be any other way? How were you supposed to know that two months later, you'd be out of a foster home and on a plane to a place where they'd lecture you on the importance of forgetting your name altogether? And you still didn't get why, only that it was the thing, and you were in this entirely different fucking _country_, and everyone had these little weird accents, and you were pretty sure they didn't like Americans there.

Not that you could've really felt insulted with their type of slang. Even when they insulted you, it sounded like something out of an old novel. Laughing got your ass kicked a few times, though. Most of the time, you could pull the crazy quiet kid card, and it actually worked.

Until he showed up.

No, fuck this. I'm telling it wrong. I can't say "you," because it's not you. It's me. Matt. And that fucker who showed up and messed everything up for everyone? Yeah, his name was Mello.

And by everyone, I mean me.

**_**

He wasn't a little blond spitfire when they ushered him in at four in the morning; all dirty hair in his eyes and tear-stained cheeks. He had snot running from his nose and his pants were too big on him. Probably community clothes from whatever shithole they'd taken him from, and he looked like a little rat with these huge, tired eyes. To this day, I don't know where the hell he was before Wammy's, but from the looks of him, it was somewhere bad. There were scratches on his arm that he probably put there himself; one of those kids who was still under the impression that someone gave a shit about him, and maybe he was right. The arm thing was a dumbshit move, because they stuck him under watch for his first two weeks, but he definitely wasn't a dumb kid. None of us were.

That's what they told us, anyway. The whole reason for being "chosen" or whatever, and maybe it was for the best. This place had three solid meals a day, and with the exception of the headmaster, everyone there was pretty cool. Well, the staff was, anyway. The kids were a bunch of little pretentious brats, and it wasn't hard to see why. They'd been fed the same bullshit that I had: that they were gifted, and it would've been a shame to leave them in with what I now refer to as general population.

That was the dividing line. The world was general population, and then there was us: the elite, the special ones, the ones who were too good to be out there, but when I looked around, all I saw were a bunch of orphans just like me, and there wasn't really anything special about any of them. Yeah, we were smart. Smarter than most adults, but at our core, we were still kids, and the place was like a madhouse, sometimes.

And then there was this L guy.

He's supposed to be this big, intricate part of the story, yeah?

Well, he's not. Not my story, at least. Ask Mello to tell you his, one day. Maybe if he's feeling up to it, he can tell you how he spent years idolizing a guy he knew jack shit about. Pretty funny story, actually.

Now, I'm not gonna say that everything was peachy until M showed up, but it was a fuck of a lot less chaotic. Once he found out that he was in line to be something great? He drove everyone nuts. Little, skinny kid with big dreams, and god forbid you told him that he was just another face. He'd kill you for that, back then. Up until the end, actually. Mello never was any good at accepting reality. Which was why when N showed up, he fucking went nuts. I mean, that tearing shit up, kicking holes in walls kind of nuts. I'd seen him mad before. Hell, I'd seen him pissed, but this was something entirely different.

This was someone who scored higher than him on the entrance assessment exam. This was competition.

I'll admit that it was entertaining, though I did feel bad for N sometimes. All the kid did was kind of shy away from everyone and do his shit, but Mello never really let him alone. He'd fuck his toys up, spit on his books when he was studying, walk past him in the dayroom and shove his face into the floor for no reason other than Mello had to be better at _something_, and Near never fought back.

Man, if that were me, I would've put that shithead through a fucking wall.

I actually did, once. But that was years later, when Mello was walking around in his bitch leather and had the fucking nerve to tell me I was posing a security risk by banging the pretty brunette a few floors down from where we were bunked up.

Man, this girl had an ass like an apple. You know how it's this huge symbol of temptation and ruin? Yeah. Pretty much that, without the ruination. Sweet deal, actually.

Oh, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Right. Back to what I like to refer to as The Great Rivalry.

Only it wasn't so great, yeah? It was one kid bullying another for scoring a couple of points extra on every exam, it was Mello being an ass because he worked for something and fell short. Sad, is what it was. What he never noticed was that to the untrained eye, he came off as a badass. But if you knew him, if you knew the kid that walked in looking like something out of Oliver Twist, you knew it was all compensation.

M never believed his own bullshit. Not at first, anyway.

And this went on for _years_. It's a wonder that Near didn't eventually snap, but it's no wonder that when it came down to the wire, Mello was the one who ended up storming out and N ended up officially taking on the L title.

I can imagine what that did for Mello's ego.

Me? I hung around for a few more years, but I'll admit that it got pretty boring after he left. And I'm not one to really get restless, but there came a point where I was half-hanging out of my window having a smoke, and it hit me: we were all there to become L, and since that was never really in my cards, what the fuck was I hanging around for?

So I left. Not in the same dramatic, I'm gonna get revenge and take over the world type of way M left. I packed a bag, told Roger I was done, and took off back to the States.

It was hard at first, but the thing about being one of Us is that we knew how to do a whole bunch of shit that the average person didn't, so it wasn't too much of a pain in the ass for me to get my shit together and make a little name for myself.

A year later, I had it all: a secure line of jobs, more money than I knew what to do with, a nice place, sweet ride, and this general sense of contentment that most people would kill for. I was alright.

And then I got a phonecall.

**_**

M, as it turns out, wasn't alright. He'd done some stupid shit, got himself into a lot of trouble, and I could've told him that his name was all over the place. He was a wanted man, both by the government and his ex-buddies. Man, if he knew the price on his head, he would've gone through the roof.

I could've made a nice buck off of him, actually. But I'm not that rotten. Even I knew that when someone calls you sounding like the most desperate person on earth, the right thing to do is try to help them out. Especially when you come from the same place. We might've not been made of the same stuff, but we both came from this place where the rest of the world never mattered, and now here we were, in general population.

I probably could've turned him down, but instead I named a price, and after a string of him telling me what a worthless motherfucker I was, he talked me down to half. Guess I wasn't so worthless, after all.

**_**

So now, he's all burnt up, looking like a broken hooker, and there's this fire in his eyes that he never had when he was young. He was determined back then, but now, it was like he had a mission. Or at least that's what he called it. I called it a death wish.

Two weeks after listening to him whine about how much it hurt, watching him down half a bottle of Percocet a day and washing it down with whiskey, and I met Ms. Apple Ass.

She definitely deserves mention, because she did this thing with her tongue that made me wanna let the world fall down around us. Let Mello get himself killed, let Kira off half of the goddamn population, just keep doing that thing you do when you're on your knees. Girl deserved a song written about her. Or a paragraph in a life story. Whichever comes up first. And she was real nice, too. Rare. Decent face, pretty eyes, and Mello hated her fucking guts.

And that's the important part, yeah? Because the world revolved around Mello, according to him, and if he didn't like someone, they had to go.

He says he got rid of her. I think that by "got rid of," he did something abysmally fucked up like told her me and him were fucking, because one day she was bobbing her head between my legs, and the next, she wouldn't answer her phone.

Whatever. I had to worry about Kira, right? No, I had to worry about _Mello_, and him worrying about Kira. Fucking asshole.

So now, it was just the two of us, which I think that somewhere in that half-crazy, fucked up head of his, is what he wanted. Because if I wasn't paying attention to anyone else, all of my attention went on him, by default. Like the family dog who eats all of the cats so he could be the only one to curl up on the foot of the bed at night.

Really fucking sick shit.

And the best part is that we never really could stand each other. There was this familiararity, but underneath it all, I resented him for pulling me out of my perfect life, and he hated the fact that he ever had to call me. So we made each other miserable, but by then, we were both pretty immune to each other's bullshit, so it came off as kind of harmless banter. A lot of it.

He'd try to pull the shit on me that he used to on Near, but one, well-placed right hook knocked him right out of that mindset. Funny how easy it was to wake him up, sometimes. And then he did that thing he used to do when he was drunk and nearly out of it, where he'd pretend things weren't as fucked up as they were, stretch his long legs out over my lap, pluck the cigarette from between my lips, and tell me that he could be anyone I wanted.

Hey, he was no Apple Ass, but a blowjob's a blowjob, right?

Right.

**_**

Look, I know I'm making him come off as a really bad person, and he was. He was a selfish, fucked up asshole who forgot about the grander scheme of things a long time ago. He was a murderer, a liar, and if L were still alive, he would've been sitting in a goddamn cell. Maybe both of us would, I don't know. He used Kira as an excuse to go nuts, to blaze a trail with his name written all over it, and in the end, it fucking got us both killed.

Me first, of course, because that's just the way shit works. But really, it wasn't that bad. I was scared, yeah, but when you're shot up a hundred fucking times, you kind of stop feeling the pain after the fourth or fifth bullet. Then it's just quiet, and that's how it is here. Quiet, and pretty fucking boring.

You see, we all think we're fighting for something. And I'm sure that people change the world, otherwise we'd still be in the stone-age. But there's this pattern of power-hungry idealists who are always going to fuck shit up for the rest of us. Kira was one.

Mello was one.

**_**

He set out to save the world, and in the end? We died for nothing. I think he knows that now.

Because there will always be a Kira, in one way or another. There will always be someone whose ambitions don't agree with people living their normal lives. Don't agree with the state of humanity, in general. It might happen every couple hundred years, thousand, whatever. But the point is that by fighting to off Kira, we were just paving the way for someone else to rise up.

We got caught up in an age-old war that borders on the philosophical. Soldiers, every one of us. And I really don't think that L intended it to be this way. Which was why he didn't choose. L was a fucking detective, not a superhero, and in taking up the Kira case, he turned us all into a bunch of pawns.

I'd blame him for fucking up Mello's head, if I didn't know any better. But that's a pretty heavy charge. Being responsible for the entity that is _Mello_ is like being responsible for a fucking war of the worlds. Big load.

But then again, M always did like to talk big.


End file.
